I didn’t truly appreciate how much I use my iPhone as an assistant/tool/crutch every two minutes until I suddenly didn’t have it this morning.

Nothing tragic (or expensive) to overcome – I just got the office, needed to check something as soon as I walked in the door and said, “SHAZZBATT!” I knew right away where I had left it. But it was at home, and I was at work.

No worries! I’m a big boy, I lived for years without one, I’m sure I can make it through one day.

Time to log onto the various bank websites that I check every day first thing. Except they all make me change passwords every 60 days or so and they all require these really complex ones instead of anything simple… It’s okay, I’ve got a hard copy in the file cabinet. But is it current?

SHAZZBATT!!

Okay, made it through that, I just have to remember to get that email off to our accountant – whose email I don’t know because it’s just stored in the phone. Nor do I have his phone number handy because, well, phone! So glad that I still remember how to use Google.

And I’ll have to remind myself that I have to go out to the hangar tonight. Normally the alarm I had set would remind me… If I forget it’s not a big deal, I’ll just call the guy I’m meeting and explain… Oh, right. No worries, I’ll just call him from work. Or I would if I had any idea what his phone number is.

Following yet another time consuming work-around (I finally remembered that a lot of this stuff was stored in my Dropbox storage and I can access that from my work computer – at least, after seven or eight tries to remember that password I can) I remember that I need to check my email regarding that meeting tonight, and send that email to the accountants. It’s okay, I can just use my Gmail account on my office computer…

Boy, good thing I have two-factor authentication set up on all of my most critical accounts! Like Gmail! I’ll bet that little phone is just pinging its head off on the bathroom sink as Gmail sends confirmation codes to it to make me prove I’m me and not some potential troll/hacker who’s trying to break in! Plan “D” (or are we up to “E”?) would be?

What was it that I needed the phone for first thing this morning when this domino Grand Prix got kicked off? Oh, yeah, I still have to solve that one. At the charity fundraising BBQ on Saturday I was using a great app on my phone to update an Excel spreadsheet that I had grabbed from our office server. Now I need the updated file, which would normally be a two-second job to email to my work mail account. But it’s not “normally” today.

This went on and on and on and on and on for the entire morning.

SHAZZBATT!!!

I get a half hour for lunch. I live approximately twelve to thirteen minutes away with good traffic. I would have made it back on time except for the fact that the local private high school had a half day and EVERYONE was clogging the streets and gridlocking the four-way stop next to the parking lot exit.

But when I got back, I still had two minutes left to quickly check email, Twitter, FaceBook, send a note to The Long-Suffering Wife, send a note to the accountant, send a note to the guy I was meeting at the hangar…